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Open beta of Eclipse Foundation's OrionHub begins

The Eclipse Foundation has announced that at least 5,000 developers may now sign up for access to the beta version of OrionHub. The service is a hosted implementation of Orion, the Foundation's new platform for building and integrating web development tools which run within the browser. Orion was launched in January and the goal of the open beta is to solicit feedback to shape Orion's roadmap as it looks at how "software development tools will move from the desktop to support a web-focused development workflow".

Users of OrionHub will find a managed and hosted resource which will allow them to experiment easily with Orion which offers them an editor, version control, file navigation and a debugger, as building blocks for more complex tools. The JavaScript-based Orion supports Chrome, Firefox 3.6 and 4.0, Microsoft IE 8 and 9 and Safari 5. It already integrates with tools such as JSLint and jsbeautify through its client side plugin architecture. The Foundation has high hopes for Orion. "It is still very early days but I expect Orion will be as important for web developers as the initial Eclipse Java IDE was for Java developers" said Eclipse's Executive Director Mike Milinkovich.

Users can sign up for the beta on the Orion page. More OrionHub slots may be opened up as the community expands, but developers can also download the code, licensed under the EPL (Eclipse Public Licence), from the Foundation's web site and run their own service. More information on Orion is available from the project's wiki. There will also be Orion related presentations at EclipseCon 2011 which is running this week in Santa Clara, California.